A DRAMATIC READING OF NEDİM GÜRSEL For a “genre” of poetry-theatre The Empathy Method

Abstract

Tuğrul İnal uses the Empathy method to analyse Nedim Gürsel’s Hatırla Barbara (2009) a compilation of the author’s memoires of France in the 1992-2008 period. The novel is a reflection and a projection of the authors 40 year long adventures in France. The novel, in places a lyrical memoire, takes the reader to the country of Baudelarie. Nedim Gürsel’s lyrical style articulates how he discovers France in the way one would discover a woman’s body, slowly, sometimes in the dark through touch, sometimes in blinding sunlight and always with passion. İnal, concentrating on the section entitled ‘Besançon’da Zaman’ (Time in Besançon) in which the writer is in the search for Heaven Lost, mounts the narrative as a theatrical monologue on the lines of ‘to be or not to be’ in terms of perceptions of memories, the past, reality and the present.